The parents like rock music and have some skull-themed things they posted on Instagram over Halloween. The kid herself looks pretty normal. The pictures of the perpetrator herself look aggressively “normal,” though the pictures obviously conceal some disturbing inner life that the child had.

If goth culture led to murder, then there would be an epidemic of violence in the suburbs perpetrated by people other than the lacrosse team.

One of my sisters-in-law has repeatedly asked for my children to stay with their family for a few weeks during the summer. She has séances in her home and has conversation with the man who committed suicide there as well as with spirits who have followed her home from the cemeteries she visits at night. Her home is decorated like Halloween all year round, and she is fascinated with the occult, ghosts, and the like. And last we spoke, she was learning to control the spiritual through the use of crystals. No. My children have never stayed the night with her and, in fact, have not been in her home without their dad or myself being with them. It has made me quite unpopular with the family. I’m okay with that.

[NFR: Absolutely, your judgment is correct. People who mess with this stuff are fools. They have the right to be fools. But I want nothing to do with it, and won’t subject my kids to it. — RD]

Okay, firstly, Daily Mail. Basically they went through these people’s Instagram, found the best photos for their angle, and got someone to write captions.

Secondly, notwithstanding the stabbing, I knew a lot of people like this in the midwest. They don’t seem any creepier than the one dad on my street who did his own taxidermy. Take away the captions and the context the paper gives to them, which is pretty speculative, and what exactly do you find creepy? It just seems like they’re into Tim Burtony stuff — I love how the DM tries to make a kid’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle halloween costume into something sinister and tawdry.

Thirdy, they stabbed their friend 19 times and he’s already out of the hospital? Does this all add up? Also, trying 12 year olds as adults? My Satanism BS Alarm is pinging off the charts on this. It’s only a matter of time before Geraldo Rivera does a 2 hour special on “Slenderman” worship.

What is it that concerns you so much? The fact that they let their teenage daughter read ghost stories (somewhat concerning)? The cutesy skull pillows and flowery skull drawings (not really concerning)? Or the pictures of Halloween decorations (not concerning at all)?

Such a tragic story. What rotten luck for all three kids that the two offenders seem not to have been introduced to a better world. Maybe they couldn’t imagine anything different.

The past can’t be undone.

Whatever the legal outcome, and no matter how much moral blame is attached to them, the two offenders still have to live. So, I hope someone enters their life and shows them a different way. It is entirely possible that they could yet become people who save lives.

Prayers for the victim.

“Go ballistic” is part of a set of memes that suggest lack of control over one’s emotions is normal. I wish it would be retired and replaced.

I don’t really see anything that “creepy”. Like Modulo said, I find people with “ILOVEEVIL” in their email addresses and listen to death metal to be more dorks than creepy. I know a bunch…mostly dorks. I would not really want my kids hanging out over there, mainly because the people are probably just kids that never really grew up.

I used to read books about UFOs and other weird crap associated with them (along the lines of Erich von Daniken and such), probably at a younger age than I should have, but I was also smart enough to know not to take all this as truth. My folks would also ask questions, not too nosey or not too dismissive, but I think looking back just so they could see what I was getting out of my media intake.

Whatever the subject is, you need to know your kids, you need to know what they are reading or watching or listening to and you need to know how they are processing this stuff.

Oh for God’s sake! So what if her Dad was into a bit of Halloween type stuff? My Mom is really into Halloween, has decorations up all year round, has a few cool oddities in the library (a phrenology head, some animal skulls, a crystal ball, stuff like that) To act like you can draw a straight line from an interest in “Goth” type culture to something like what happened with this girl is just inane.

Of course, after what happened we can assume that there was indeed something was wrong in the family. But to say that there was OBVIOUSLY something wrong, because someone who was into goth stuff could only possibly be a dangerous weirdo, well that’s just not fair.

Frankly you’re coming across as a stereotype of a religious conservative- the sort who wants to ban Halloween and thinks that Dungeons and Dragons is a form of Devil worship. Honestly. Stay away from the Daily Fail in the future, Rod.

[NFR: I didn’t say this stuff compelled the kid to attempt murder. I just said the atmosphere of darkness at that house is creepy. I played D&D growing up, and played it last year with my kids. — RD]

I would add to my comments that I think that our culture often regards any mention or acknowledgement of death as breaches of optimism. Denial about death and excessive fascination with horror are opposite sides of the same coin.

Honestly, the whole story made me think seriously about demonic possession. They left their spirits wide open to it. I think evil preys on the vulnerable and emotionally unstable. I don’t agree with trying them as adults. They belong in a psych hospital.

Contrary to many commentaries here I think this is relevant: it is one thing for one to get interesting in this sort of thing when one is a teenager (and I agree that to continue with such sensibilities mostly mean some sort of immaturity), but it is another thing to grow up in such an environment.

To say that it doesn’t matter one already has to assume that no matter how a child is nurtured, it will grow up with vaguely christian, liberal, western morals (aka “decent people”, “normal folks”, etc). This is just plain false.

I Googled to see how the victim was doing. The good news is that I couldn’t find any stories saying she died, so hopefully she’ll pull through. The bad news is that apparently there’s been a second slender man stabbing.

What I really don’t get about this is that Slender man is a transparent work of fiction. It’s like trying to kill someone to appease Megatron from Transformers.

It’s all in how it turns out, isn’t it? Probably thirty percent of the population has stuff that creepy in their files (Ooh, they dressed their son as a ninja turtle for Hallowe’en!), but we won’t get yellow journalism articles about us unless our children do something wrong. You can just bet that if your kids go bad, the juicy parts of Dante’s inferno will appear online under a headline ‘House of horror bedtime reading’.

Because everybody wants to be able to point to something the parents did and say to themselves ‘I never did that with my kids, so we’re safe.’ It’s folk science, searching for causes and correlations, and watching it thrash around fills me with amazement that our species ever managed to create actual science that truly solves problems.

For the record, everyone in my family thinks having an image of a tortured-to-death Jewish carpenter in your house is really creepy. In one context they are probably right: it is a lot more disturbing than any of the images these geeks posted to social media.
The daily mail is only slightly above the supermarket tabloid.

Umm, Rod, you might want to look at what some artists have done with the Crucifixion before talking about “creepy images.”

(These people? They aren’t even real occultists. One of the major axioms of the occult as a belief system is that you don’t introduce it to kids. Period. It’s too dangerous. You’ve got to be an adult and in full control of your facilities before you start studying this stuff. Plus immense self-control.)

[NFR: I didn’t say this stuff compelled the kid to attempt murder. I just said the atmosphere of darkness at that house is creepy….

Sorry, that’s just weaselly. You didn’t “say” anything. You implied. But if you want to say something, go ahead and actually say it; make an argument, then we can discuss it. At least then you would be forthright about your attempt to blame the family.

As is, this post is beneath you.

[NFR: Oh, please. If I wanted to blame the family, I would have blamed the family. The post means exactly what I said: that this dark kid was raised in a dark family, and that I wouldn’t have wanted my kids to have had anything to do with a family like this. — RD]

I wouldn’t let my kid go to their house, but just because everything exhibited on that instagram feed – tatoos, piercings, “stoner metal” band dad, weird artwork by mom with skulls, encouraging their daughter to draw bizarre pictures of dumb monsters discovered on the internet, etc. – all says to me that these parents are not adults; that they are probably those sort of parents who are just friends with their kids, rather than parents; and that they probably do not share the same values as we do. My decision to not allow my daughter over there would have less to do with fear of ghosts and goblins, than just simply keeping my kid away from a family that will likely try to undermine our efforts and authority as her parents. But their kids would be welcome to come to our house if they wished, where I could keep proper supervision.

[NFR: Oh, please. If I wanted to blame the family, I would have blamed the family. The post means exactly what I said: that this dark kid was raised in a dark family, and that I wouldn’t have wanted my kids to have had anything to do with a family like this. — RD]

OK, gotcha. You didn’t actually want to imply blame, you just felt like piling on this family’s tragedy by pointing out that they’re weird. Sorry I misunderstood.

I’ll eat the tasty bait: not only would I let my kids attend a sleepover at their house, I’d encourage them to do so in order to try to befriend the parents, who seem cool, fun and interesting. Tragic that their daughter turns out to be mentally ill, but statistics are brutal — if it’s not a murderous kid it’s lung cancer in a non-smoker or a piano falling on one’s head.

Well, you know, suburban white girls are like that. Its in their culture. They have no responsibilities so they just hang out in wierd gangs turning vicious fantasies into reality. They think the world owes them a living, and a good time. It all starts at home, with the parents, who instill these values. And if any parents TRY to steer their daughter to anything better? Well, when they get out on the street, or to school they quickly learn different.

Why do I get the feeling that any of the following hypotheticals (none of which, of course, apply to this case) would have been considered fair game for speculation had they been true:

1. The parents are strict evangelical/fundamentalist Christians, which clearly led their child to seek a fictional dark anti-hero as a way of escaping her parents’ control of her life.

2. The parents are avid hunters, so clearly their casual bloodshed-based lifestyle influenced their daughter to think killing was no big deal.

3. The parents have many children, so clearly they didn’t pay enough attention to this one.

4. The parents were homeschooling weirdos, so clearly their child suffered from a lack of proper socialization.

Why is it okay to point to extremely strict fundamentalism, hunting/gun culture, large families, or homeschooling as possible influences when a child snaps and commits a violent act, but NOT okay to point to the parents’ immersion in creepy/goth culture and occult trappings as a possible clue to why their 12-year-old thought Slender Man was real and wanted to kill someone as a sacrifice to him so he would manifest himself to her and maybe give her dark powers like his own? Seriously, why is that off-limits?

I don’t know. It seems pretty obvious to me that the sort of Goth culture that was apparently part of the background of both girls’ lives might have been a negative influence, particularly if they are both mentally ill. They look like a pair of intelligent little nerds to me and one of the temptations of intelligent little nerds is getting overly caught up in a fantasy world. Unfortunately for these kids, it was Slender Man instead of Lord of the Rings or Star Trek or even Twilight.

And no, if I were asked, I wouldn’t allow my nephews to play in the home of a family that posted this kind of crap on the Internet or encouraged this sort of hobby. I doubt my brother would entertain the idea either. There’s a difference between watching the occasional horror movie and turning it into an all-encompassing passion.

Erin, the correct response to your query/challenge is they should all be off-limits.

We have the typical speculations leading to conclusions directly from the correlation-causation fallacy. The Daily Mail article, I should point out, published the entire response from the CreepyPasta website that publishes the scary stories, and it should be required reading.